More Than One Kind
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Booth and Brennan's daughter describes the deep bond that formed between her family and First Sergeant Lou Bastone's following his death in Afghanistan in 2010. A futurefic set twenty-three years after the events at the end of "Killing Two Birds."
1. Chapter 1

**More Than One Kind**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

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**A/N: **_This story is an AU futurefic set many years after the events of my 2012 story, "Killing Two Birds" but, as you'll see, the events of K2B are central to understanding this piece. Though it may be obvious already or will as soon as you start reading, please note that for the purpose of this story, most of the salient events of Bones Seasons 6, 7, 8 and 9 did not occur. Instead...well, read on and find out._

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**Chapter 1**

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My mom has a photograph of my father she keeps at work, tucked in a desk drawer in her office at the Jeffersonian.

When I was a girl, Dad insisted that she keep me away from all the "dead bodies." So on those occasions when Mom needed to be at the lab for some reason and I couldn't go to school or daycare because I was sick or it was a holiday and Grandpa Max wasn't available to look after me, I'd sit in Mom's or Aunt Angela's office. When Mom left me in her office while she was examining remains, I would wait until I saw her step onto the forensics platform and then I'd open her right-hand desk drawer. The photo was always on top, tucked into a protective plastic sleeve, and I would pull it out of the drawer with a quiet, careful reverence.

I remember looking at it when I was little, maybe five or six years old, and thinking that Dad looked like a prince in that photo.

It was actually more than just a photograph. It was a newspaper clipping from the front page of the _New York Times, _dated about a year before I was born, showing my father in a dark blue Army dress uniform, his coat sleeves covered with row after row of rank chevrons and service stripes. In the photo, Dad's shown from the waist up with his hand resting palm down on the flag's red stripes and his green beret-clad head is lowered so that his forehead nearly touches the flag on top of the brushed aluminum coffin.

In big bold letters over Dad's picture, there's a headline that says, _Brooklyn Hero Comes Home, _and underneath reads another line in somewhat smaller typeface that says, _Special Forces Soldier Was One of 21 Killed in Helmand Crash. _Beneath the picture of my father is a caption that says, _A comrade of U.S. Army First Sergeant Louis A. Bastone, himself the sole survivor of the tragic crash, says an emotional goodbye at Bagram Air Base before accompanying the fallen hero on his final journey home._

Even now, the photo still moves me, and I still love it every bit as much as I did when I was a little girl, even though my understanding of that photo and what it represents evolved and grew as I did.

I love that photo because, in a way, it shows so much of who my father is through the glimpse of a single moment: a brave man with an unwavering sense of solemn duty and a big heart who is at once strong and deeply vulnerable. The pockmarked edge of his clean-shaven jaw is rigid with bottled-up grief as the tips of his fingers curl slightly against the fabric of the flag, and I swear I can see him fighting the tide of emotion inside of himself, trying not to rend those fingers against the top of his friend's temporary aluminum coffin as his strong, muscular shoulders hunch and shake with anguish.

Of course, I never actually knew Lou Bastone. He died in Afghanistan more than a year before I was born. In fact, my mother never knew him either. Things had gotten strained between her and Dad, which led to her going off to Indonesia for a year and him to Afghanistan. It was only when Dad's unit was involved in the helicopter crash that killed Lou Bastone and twenty of my father's other comrades that Mom left Indonesia to go to Afghanistan to help identify their remains. That was when my parents finally confronted their love for one another.

Even though I never knew Lou Bastone, _Uncle Louie _(as I came to think of him) was always a silent but very real presence in my life as I was growing up. I was named after him. Thinking about what it would've been like to hear my parents bicker about how to name me after Dad's friend Lou still makes me smile. (What I would give to have been a fly on the wall during _that _conversation!) Though I imagine she teased him a little about naming his kids after deceased Army comrades (my brother Parker and I are both named for people my dad served with who didn't make it home from war), I know she never resisted him on it because, in the end, I don't think there's anything Mom wouldn't do for Dad and she knew how important it was to him to honor Lou's memory. So that's how I came to be named Lucia Christine Booth—for my father's fallen Army buddy and for my maternal grandmother, neither of whom I ever met but both of whom I grew up hearing stories about.

Mom said Dad didn't used to talk about his experiences in the Army, and to a large extent, he still doesn't. I know he was a sniper in the Gulf War and after that, he was a Ranger (where he served in all sorts of places, including Somalia, Guatemala, several countries in Africa including Rwanda, Zaire and the Congo, and in Kosovo, which was his last mission as a Ranger) and lastly, when he went back into the Army in 2010, he served with the Special Forces in Afghanistan's Helmand Province.

Dad doesn't talk about what he did in those places, or the people he killed. What he does talk about, and according to Mom this is something he didn't used to do before, are his friends—the men he served with, some of whom he still keeps in contact with, some of whom he lost track of over the years after they came home from their deployments, and others who never came home. Sometimes it seems like I know these men, guys like Swann, Parker, Matthews, Kennedy, Parnell, and Lou, of course, because of all the stories Dad would tell about them.

Mom says that, as part of the therapy Dad did when he came back from Afghanistan, he learned to open up and talk about his buddies so that, even if he didn't talk about the things he did in combat or the people he killed or the men he saw die, he would feel less burdened overall because he could relieve some of the pressure of holding those experiences inside by talking about the men themselves as guys, as human beings, as the men they were. He'd tell stories about jokes they played on each other in the barracks, the way they'd bust each others' balls, all the times they got drunk together, and the endless back-and-forth about each others' sports teams or hometowns or music.

Of all of the men he served with over the years, Teddy Parker, Hank Luttrell, Mike Swann and Lou Bastone left the deepest mark on my father as a man, and these are the men he speaks of more than any of the others. Mom says it made a big difference for Dad to be finally be able to open up about those experiences. I know she's right, and also that him talking about those men, especially the men he served with in Afghanistan and above all, Lou Bastone, made a difference for Lou's family. In a way, Dad was the only link that Lou's family had to him after he died, and I think that Dad being there for them, having known Lou and being able to tell them about the conversations the two of them had while they served together, meant that they could still have that connection with him by connecting with the man who carried with him the memory of Lou's last months on this earth.

His widow, Darleen, and his children, Michael (seven years older than me) and Celia (a year older than me) have always been a part of our family, and we see them a several times a year. My parents always made it a point to get together with them during the week between Christmas and New Year's and for a couple of weeks every summer when Dad would pile us all in the big black SUV and we'd drive up to the Jersey Shore where he and Mom would rent a beach house big enough for the three of them, the four of us (Mom, Dad, me and my brother Parker) and Mom's brother Russ, his wife and their daughters, my step-cousins Hayley and Emma. Add all of them together with my Aunt Angela, Uncle Hodgins and their son, Michael Vincent (Angela and Hodgins, of course, aren't actually my biological aunt and uncle, but Dad always said "there's more than one kind of family," and to me, they were always part of our family), it's no wonder my parents never felt the need to have another child after me. Our house seemed like it was always full of people.

Celia and I were closer in age to one another than either of us was to any of the other kids in the Booth/Brennan/Bastone clan, and so even though they lived in Brooklyn and we always lived in the D.C. area, we were almost like sisters. We spent our summers together, with her coming down from New York to spend half of July and most of the month of August with us before heading back up north to start school after Labor Day. After high school (she graduated a year before I did), Celia and I both ended up at Cornell, where she studied Biomedical Engineering and I got a degree in Biology with a concentration in Systematics and Biotic Diversity. After finishing her degree, Celia moved out to Boulder, Colorado to take a job with a company that designs and manufactures custom prosthetic devices for limb amputees, while I moved back to the D.C. area to work at the National Zoo.

The summer after Celia moved out to Boulder, she came back east to visit and brought her fiancé, Caleb, with her. We all converged on the beach house in New Jersey, the same way we always did when we were all kids, except we were all older now—Parker came with his wife and twin six year-old sons, and so did Michael, whose wife had just had their second child eight weeks earlier—and Dad whipped up one of his amazing batches of spaghetti and meatballs to feed the entire crew (well, the twelve of us who weren't living off breast milk, that is). After dinner, Mom came out with two homemade apple pies and a gallon of vanilla bean ice cream, and whatever infinitesimally small corner of our stomachs that wasn't stuffed with Dad's spaghetti and seasoned meatballs was quickly filled with gooey a la mode goodness.

We were all sitting on the U-shaped sectional in the family room watching the Braves/Phillies game when Celia came in from the kitchen holding two bottles of beer in each hand. She handed Michael and Caleb each a Brooklyn Beer Summer Ale then gave Parker a Yuengling before she sat down next to Dad on the sofa. Dad's dark brows furrowed over his eyes as the Phillies bungled what should have been an easy double play and, after growling something under his breath about the stupid Phillies snatching defeat from the jaws of victory again, he turned to her with an expectant waggle of his fingers and a twinkle in his eye.

Celia chuckled and rolled her pale blue eyes at my father, then handed him the sweating bottle of cold Yuengling. She watched him bring the bottle to his lips and tip it back as he took a long swig, then set the bottle down on the glass-topped coffee table with a satisfied _ahh._

"Hey, Booth?" she said, shooting Caleb a quick look before taking a deep breath and turning back to Dad.

Dad's warm, chocolate brown eyes narrowed when he heard the odd, reedy lilt in Celia's voice, then his dark eyebrows flew up and deep creases dug into his forehead the way they always did when he copped his trademark look of uncertainty. (I call it his _"Whut?" _look.)

"What is it, Cel?" he asked her. Sometimes I think Dad is physically incapable of calling someone by their normal, given, Christian name. Though he and Mom discussed at great length how to name me and finally, after what I imagine was weeks if not months of back and forth, finally settled on Lucia, according to Angela, I wasn't out of my mother's womb ten minutes before he was holding me against his chest and cooing, _"Hey Lulu-Bee, it's your dad." _I can't remember a time when Dad didn't call Celia "Cel" (pronounced just like the fish-eating sea mammal with flippers).

Celia closed her eyes and took a deep breath then, turning to look at me for a fleeting second as I gave her a silent nod of encouragement, leaned gently into my dad's shoulder for a second and said, "I want to ask a favor of you."

There was a gravity in her voice—not a sadness, really, but a hesitation born of the knowledge that there were times that it was easy enough to not think about the painful loss that her mother and my father had experienced just ten days after she was born, and times when the loss and the absence were inescapably real. Two decades had come and gone since her father's death, but the Lou-sized hole in their lives never completely closed up.

"Oh, okay." Dad blinked, his eyes swiveling left to meet my mom's gaze for a moment before he turned and pressed a kiss against the top of her head, then smiled and tousled her hair. "Shoot," he said, leaning forward to mute the TV and grab his beer off the table. "What's up?"

The corner of Celia's mouth curved into an awkward smile under my father's grinning gaze. He did this to all of us at one time or the other. My mother complains about how many times that smile of his has defused her anger before she could even think about ranting after he had done something stupid or thoughtless or hard-headed. Parker has the same smile and heaven help us if the two of them unleash those toothy smiles and twinkly eyes on us at the same time—Mom and I would be utterly helpless to resist their charms.

Dad tipped his Yuengling back for another sip and that brief break in eye contact was enough to enable Celia to gather up a bit of courage and tighten her resolve before letting go of the question she'd been holding onto for weeks. I heard her take a deep breath as my dad set his beer down and looked at her, his eyes slightly widened in expectation as she looked down at her hand and wiggled the diamond engagement ring on her finger.

"Well, see...I, umm...I was wondering if…" She closed her eyes and took a breath to settle herself and relax away her stammer. I was sitting on the other end of the sectional but when she opened her eyes after taking that deep breath, she turned and for the briefest second, our eyes met and I gave her a solemn nod.

The crooked grin on my dad's face faded as he saw the nervousness in the shifting of her jaw and the quiver of her dark, finely-shaped eyebrows, and his own eyes widened a little with a swirl of confusion, curiosity and concern that was uniquely his own. Celia swallowed thickly and tried again, rolling her lips together before parting them again in a smile.

"I want you to walk me down the aisle," she said as she brought her eyes up to meet his.

"Wait, what?" My father blinked a couple of times and his brow crinkled over his eyes. "Umm, no, I mean...well, what about your uncle Jimmy?" Dad's voice was a little ragged at the edges with the emotion I saw shimmering in his warm brown eyes. Jimmy was Lou Bastone's younger brother who lived in White Plains, New York, about an hour north of Brooklyn, where Darleen lived. Jimmy and Lou weren't close when Lou was alive and, while Jimmy tried to keep in better touch with his brother's widow and kids after his brother died in Afghanistan, there was always a distance between Darleen and Jimmy that neither closed nor widened over the years, but which seemed to persist in its own awkward way.

"Booth," Celia whispered, reaching over and grasping my father's big, veiny, thick-fingered hand and curling her own slender fingers around his palm which was—after decades spent holding a rifle and, later, a pistol—rough with calluses that we each had grown up knowing as the texture of protection and safety. "I want _you_ to give me away, Booth."

Dad's mouth fell open and his jaw shifted from one side to the other as he struggled for words. "I-I...well...I just…"

Celia looked over at my mother, who was sitting on my dad's left. Mom's eyes, which were lighter and grayer than Celia's, were bright and moist but not watery the way they had been when Celia stood in the kitchen the night before and told us what she planned to ask Dad the next day. Mom gave Celia a solemn, encouraging nod.

My best friend smiled, then rolled her lips together in a firm line as her blue eyes shone with emotion. "A bride should walk down the aisle with her father," she declared. "It's tradition, right? And, well…"

She drew another breath and squeezed my dad's big hand.

"You're the only father I've ever known."

A heavy silence hung in the air as all of our hearts clenched a little at those words. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mom touch Darleen's arm as my dad looked over and watched them both for a second. Lou's widow, who for all of my life I'd known as Aunt Darleen, placed her hand on top of my mom's as her eyes met Dad's. She held his gaze for a moment as everyone in the room watched them, then tilted her head to the side and raised her brows as a faint smile curved her lips.

The silence in that room held for another few moments before Michael's eight week-old daughter suddenly began to cry. Glancing down at the tiny child in his arms whose pink-cheeked face was screwed into an angry grimace, Michael stood up and rocked little Patricia back and forth as he waited for his wife to retrieve her for a feeding. The baby's crying drew my father's attention and he watched Michael hand the child off to his wife. As mother and child disappeared up the stairs, Dad sighed and raked his hand through his thick hair (which had years ago lost its dark brown color in favor of a salt and pepper hue that gave him an air of gentlemanly distinctiveness). He turned to Celia and looked at her for a second, then snaked his arm around her shoulder and reeled her into a hug, gently cupping the back of her head in his big bear-mitt of a hand before pulling away a little to place a kiss on her forehead.

"I'd be honored," he told her, his voice breaking a little as he smiled and rubbed his hand over her back. Celia smiled, kissing my dad on the side of his gray-stubbled cheek as she wiped the tears from her eyes with the heel of her hand.

"Me, too," she whispered.

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**A/N:** _This not going to be a long story. Maybe three or four chapters. But it's been sitting in my head for well over a year and the time has come to let it out._

_This is very unlike other things I've written, and I admit to being a little nervous about it. It's a little sentimental, told from an OC point of view, and is very much a future fic. _

_Was it worth the read? Should I keep going? Let me know._


	2. Chapter 2

**More Than One Kind**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

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**A/N: **_I really wasn't sure when I posted this that folks would dig it. It's not my usual. It's WAAAY farther out in the future than anything I've ever done. It's narrated by a non-canonical character (sort of). It's just...well, I'm glad people __are__ enjoying it. So, without further ado, read on._

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**Chapter 2**

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Parker and I went jogging before breakfast the day before Celia's wedding, following her fiancé's tip to hit the trails along the base of the craggy, tree-dotted hills that rose up on the western edge of town. We decided to run along Mapleton Avenue west towards the foothills and then along the Dakota Ridge Trail for a couple of miles before heading back to the hotel. It was short run compared to the five or six miles we each were used to, but between Boulder's 5,400-foot elevation and the trail's winding, hilly path, the four-mile jog was more than enough to get our hearts pumping. Although the high-altitude air left us gasping a bit more for breath than we were accustomed to, after a few minutes we settled into a pace comfortable enough for us to maintain while talking.

"You know, I still remember that first Christmas," he told me as we started down the groomed gravel trail. His voice had almost a dreamy aspect to it as he found himself mentally caught up in the memory.

"I was just a little baby, Parks," I mused, laughing at myself as I said it. "I mean, a _really _little baby."

He rolled his eyes in feigned disdain. "No," he said with a smirk. "Not _that_ Christmas. I mean the one before that, Lu. The one before Dad and Bones got married. You know—right after he got back from Afghanistan."

"Oh," I said, wincing awkwardly at the error of my assumption. Usually, when Mom and Dad talk about our first Christmas, they mean our first Christmas as a family—that is, the one that came two weeks after I was born. "Okay..."

Parker turned and shot me a strange look as we rounded the bend into a copse of Scotch pine trees dense enough to make us miss the way the bright morning sun warmed our arms. I could tell from his sudden pause that whatever memory he was thinking of wasn't an entirely positive one.

"That year, I spent Christmas Eve with my mom and Christmas Day with Dad and Bones," he explained. "He'd moved into Bones' apartment, and she'd turned her spare bedroom into my bedroom. Dad had set up a tree and decorated the apartment with lights and all. It was great. A lot more Christmasy than it ever was before Dad moved in."

I smiled, remembering the pictures I'd seen of Mom's old loft, which always struck me as being as tidy and organized as a museum, and, yet, just a little bit empty. She sold it a couple of months before I was born when my parents bought the house in Virginia. They wanted a home big enough for our whole family: Mom, Dad, me and Parker. It may seem strange, but I've always thought of Parker as my brother—not as my _half_-brother, but simply as my brother—and I think it's because from the very beginning, Mom thought of him as her son. Our home was his home, and he was always part of our family.

"He was sad," Parker said, his eyes narrowing at the memory. I looked over at him and noted my father's features in his profile. As we moved out of the trees and back into a clearing, I could see the sun reflecting off the light brown stubble on his jaw.

"You mean Dad?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, pouting his lips with a little sigh. We'd decided to run twenty-five minutes and then turn around. "He tried to put a brave face on and all, you know—the way he always does, right? Smiling and laughing and joking and teasing and everything..." Parker paused for a minute, staring distractedly at the trail ahead of us before continuing. "But when we sat down in the living room next to the tree so I could open my presents, he just lost it."

"Lost it?"

Parker stopped running, slowing his long strides to a heavy-footed walk as he breathed a hard sigh and put his hands on his hips. He stared at his feet for a moment, then looked up, his brown eyes squinting a little in the sun.

"Yeah," he said. "As soon as I began opening the first of my presents, he started crying, you know. I mean, really crying. Tears in his eyes and streaming down his face, gritting his teeth as he put his hand in front of his face, as if he didn't want me looking at him like that, and he kind of curled into a ball against the couch. I didn't understand what was happening. Bones asked me to go into the kitchen and make a couple of cups of hot chocolate, and then she put her arms around him. I went into the kitchen, and I heard her talking to him in a low voice, but I couldn't quite make out what she was saying to him."

I felt an ache in my chest as I imagined the scene my brother described: my father in pain, Mom trying to comfort him, and my brother, confused and probably a little scared about what was happening. "Parks, did you know back then what—"

He shook his head as he pushed off and began running again. "I mean, I knew Dad got hurt over there," he said. "That he broke his arm and hit his head, got stitches and all that, but…" He sighed, ruffled his wavy blond hair with his hand, then began to jog again, turning back the way we came. "Dad and my mom tried to protect me from the ugliness of what happened," he said, panting out his words in harsh, breathy phrases as the thin air began to wear on us both. "So it wasn't until Dad got back from Afghanistan that I found out he'd been involved in that crash."

I glanced over at my brother and watched his jaw clench and pulse the way our father's does when he's tense. I drew a sharp breath as the parallel called to mind the image of my father, his features taut with grief as he stood next to his dead comrade's coffin on the tarmac in Afghanistan.

"The picture?" I asked, my voice almost a gasp as I struggled to keep pace with my longer-legged older brother.

Parker pumped his arms as he ran up the slope that rose up front of us. "Yeah," he said, focusing his eyes on the trail in front of him as I waited for him to offer me a glance. "My mom's always subscribed to the _New York Times,_" he explained. "For as long as I can remember, really, even though we always lived in D.C. She says she picked up the habit the summer while she was a law clerk working at the D.A.'s office in New York, the summer before she got pregnant with me. You know, when she was still in law school."

I skidded down the other side of the slope where the gravel path had loosened and exposed the bare dirt underneath. By the time Parker turned around and reached his arm out to catch me, I'd already regained my footing. I thanked him with a silent smile as I patted him on the back and signaled for him to keep going as I found my pace again.

"It was a Thursday morning, I think," he said. "Mom'd just sat down at the dining room table and was nagging on me to finish my oatmeal when she unfolded the newspaper. Her jaw dropped when she saw the picture on the front page and her face went white, like she'd seen a ghost."

Suddenly, my brother slowed his pace a little, which made me worry that the gravity of the conversation was wearing on him. I was about to change the subject to something lighter when he pulled up the bottom of his sweat-logged FBI T-shirt and wiped his brow with it, then let it fall over his belly again, the same way Dad always does when he's out in the garage working on his Chevelle or working in the garden. Angela always used to joke how Parker was "Booth Junior" but her quip proved prophetic when, three years after graduating from law school, my brother quit his job as an assistant district attorney in Montgomery County, Maryland and applied to the FBI. I still remember the look on Dad's face the Parker announced he'd given his two weeks at the D.A.'s office and was heading down to Quantico to begin the twenty-week course for new Special Agents. After graduating from the Academy, he and his wife moved to Charlotte where he had been assigned to the white collar crime section of the Charlotte field office. Mom and Dad were thrilled beyond words to see Parker following in Dad's footsteps, even though the career change meant we wouldn't see him every weekend the way we used to when he lived in Bethesda. I've heard the way Dad's voice brightens when he tells people that his son is a Special Agent in the Charlotte field office. He couldn't be more proud of him, I think, and grateful, too, that Parker has been able to get where he has without having to go through what Dad did to get to the same place.

"I was stunned," he said, his words tugging me back to the present. "You know, when I saw that big picture of Dad in a dress uniform on the front page of the _Times. _I'd never seen him in a uniform like that, so it was kind of weird seeing him in all the get-up and the regalia. I remember thinking at the time that he looked like a general with all those ribbons and stripes on his cuff." He laughed and shrugged. "I was eleven, right?" he chuckled. "What did I know? Anyway, once I got over the surprise of seeing him in uniform like that, I saw the look on his face and the way he was touching that flag-draped coffin, then read the headline and that's when I knew."

Parker's mouth hung open for a moment as his brows furrowed in thought.

"It's funny," he murmured. "Mom didn't try to pull the paper away or anything. She didn't even try to explain. She just kind of looked at me with a sad look on her face. I think she knew that she didn't need to say anything right then. The picture kind of said it all. I knew, you know, and she knew I knew."

I felt a dull, round ache in my chest at the thought of what it had been like for my father back then, and for my mother and brother to see him suffer like that. I knew from Mom and Angela that Dad struggled quite a bit in the first year or so after he came home from Afghanistan. He had trouble sleeping through the night, but refused to take the Ambien his doctor prescribed because, in his words, _"I have enough problems remembering and not remembering shit." _Loud, abrupt noises—like the crack of a car backfiring—would startle him, and the sound of a helicopter's rotors passing overhead would send him into a cold sweat. All of these things made sense, considering what had happened to him over there. For some reason, though, hearing my brother talk about what happened that first Christmas after Afghanistan brought into sharp relief how deeply wounded my father was by what happened that crisp October morning in Marjah.

Dad's always loved Christmas. It's his favorite holiday and, as far as I can tell, it always has been. He gets so exuberant by the time Christmas morning rolls around that it's like watching a six foot-tall elf on crack, the way he bounces around with his silly green hat with the fuzzy ball tassel and cookie crumbs shamelessly stuck to the front of his Penn State sweatshirt as he plays Nerf football in the backyard with my nephews.

So it kills me to imagine my brother as a kid, sitting Indian-style by the tree with a half-unwrapped gift in front of him and a helpless, confused look on his face as he watched my dad crumple into a ball next to him, sobbing as the tears streaked down his face.

"Later, though, Mom told me not to ask him about it," Parker said as we finally passed the trailhead and began to make our way back down Mapleton to the hotel. "She said..." He hesitated again and wiped away a bead of sweat that had dribbled down in front of his ear. "She told me Dad lost a lot of close friends in that accident and that...well, that he'd talk to me about it when he was ready."

I suddenly remembered a vague, distant memory of sitting on my dad's lap in front of the computer watching him type, and noticing for the first time the long, silvery scar that ran down his forearm towards his wrist. I remembered touching it, and the way the skin dipped a little and felt smooth, almost slippery because no hair grew there.

"Did he?" I asked, taking a deep breath as I tugged at my own T-shirt, which by then had begun to cling to me like a second skin as the sun rose higher in the sky. "I mean, did Dad ever talk to you about it?"

Parker shook his head and stopped running as we approached the corner of Mapleton and Broadway. He propped his hands on his hips and shook out his legs, one by one, then began to walk.

"No," he said as he glanced over his shoulder at me. "Not really. And I never asked." He raked his hand through his hair and sighed. "I always just assumed he wanted to leave all that behind him, and so I never asked. I know it took a long time for him to get past that sense of guilt that he felt, being the one who survived when all those other guys didn't make it. I was afraid that..." He stopped and stood at the corner as a light rail train buzzed through the intersection. "I didn't want to reopen that wound, you know. So I never asked." Parker's gaze followed the train as it moved south and out of view. "You know what I mean?" he asked, his lip curled in query as he turned to me.

"I do," I told him.

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**A/N:** _OK—so, what did you think? Parker gets short shrift in canon these days, but I try to keep him in sight when I'm writing. Tell me what you think of this piece. It's not exactly my usual, but I hope it's working for you anyway. Let me know. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Leave a review :-) And thanks for reading!_


	3. Chapter 3

**More Than One Kind**

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By: dharmamonkey  
Rating: T  
Disclaimer: _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

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**A/N: **_Kleenex, people. Those of you inclined to get misty, well—you might want to have them handy. Just sayin'. Oh, and Happy New Year!_

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**Chapter 3**

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Maybe it's silly, because I know there's no way in the world this would have happened, but as I waited for Mom and Dad in the lobby of the Hotel Boulderado that afternoon so we could all head over to the church for the rehearsal, I imagined how Dad would have looked in his old Army uniform.

I wondered what he'd look like in dress blues, with the dark coat and blue trousers with the gold braid down the sides of the legs, the rack of medals on one side of his chest and the Special Forces insignia with its _"De oppresso liber" _motto pinned to his right, and his sleeves adorned with sergeant major's insignia and campaign stripes on the cuff. I couldn't help but imagine what he'd look like wearing a green beret with his hair cropped extra-short and his silver sideburns trimmed high and razor-close above his ears.

It's strange, but I've always thought of my dad as a soldier.

Although Dad was out of the Army by the time I was born, I've always considered him a military man. Being a soldier is part of who he is—as a person, and as a man. He keeps some of his Army decorations, including his Bronze Star, in a frame on the wall behind his desk at work, and he still wears a heavy brass belt buckle embossed with a pair of crossed muskets—the longtime symbol of the infantry—with his suits. He has an uncanny ability to recognize other veterans just from a person's carriage and mannerisms, and he naturally gravitates towards such people at any conference or social gathering (a skill I like to call "mil-dar"). He and Mom have both been active in raising money for veterans' causes over the years. Dad volunteers as a mentor with the Wounded Warrior Project's Combat Stress Recovery Program, which helped him after he came back from Afghanistan. Dad's even taken up the cause at work, and has been a strong advocate for actively hiring and promoting veterans at the FBI since he finally left the Army in 2010.

General Douglas MacArthur is famously quoted as saying,_ "Old soldiers never die; they just fade away._" Dad's an old soldier, but he learned the hard way that wars don't end when the shooting stops and that the soldier inside never really fades away. He came home from his last war and, despite the horror he experienced over there, successfully transitioned back to civilian life, yet twenty-some years after Dad received his DD-214 and left military service for good, he's still a soldier at heart.

_A warrior_, as Mom would say.

I stood there in the lobby and smiled while I watched my parents walk down the staircase. Dad's hand was resting on the small of my mother's back but as they reached the bottom of the stairs. His arm snaked around her waist and I saw his big fingers curl around the curve of her hip. Mom looked stellar as usual, with her gray-streaked hair pulled into a bun, exposing her neck and drawing my eyes to the necklace of red coral beads that coordinated with the tiny floral accents on her black wraparound dress. Dad looked sharp and snappy as he always did in crisply-pressed black slacks and jacket, a French blue shirt with the top two buttons unbuttoned, and high-shine black wingtips.

"You look great, Lucy," Dad told me, giving me one of his one-armed, squeezing hugs and dropping a kiss on the top of my head. "Are you ready?" He'd just pulled the rental car keys out of his pocket when Mom's mobile phone rang.

"Brennan," I heard my mother murmur into the handset. Dad's eyes narrowed and his lips pouted out a little bit as he listened to the quiet chirping of the voice on the other end of the line. "Yes," Mom said to the caller. "I understand, but I am in Colorado for a family wedding and will not be able to assist until I return…" It seemed by the chirpy chattering that the caller was objecting. "I'm sorry, but Dr. Bray is more than capable of handling the situation in my stead until Wednesday..."

As Mom proceeded to give a mini-lecture to the caller about the instructions she left during her absence, I saw my dad's brows slope low over his eyes as he grumbled under his breath. As Mom was wrapping up her phone call, he gazed up and his eyes met mine, and for a moment we just looked at each other. Five years after his mandatory retirement from the FBI's Special Agent force (even with a one-year extension, he had no choice but to step down at fifty-eight), he still missed working in the field as a badge-carrying federal law enforcement officer.

_"Boots on the ground," _he called it. That's what my father loved best and what he missed the most.

Dad finished his career at the top of his profession, spending the last four years as the Special Agent in Charge of the D.C. Field Office before the age rules forced him out. Even after that, he was able to stay with the FBI as the Assistant Director for the Bureau's Training Division, which put him in charge of the FBI Academy and the FBI National Academy (which provides advanced training to non-federal law enforcement), as well as training programs for intelligence analysts and other FBI personnel. At sixty-three, he'd been Assistant Director for five years and was vested in a second federal pension, yet he still stubbornly resisted the idea of retirement. Mom was convinced that Dad wasn't going to retire until she did. She was exploring a way to revert to some kind of emeritus status at the Jeffersonian where she would only be called in to consult on unusually difficult cases, but she was still working out the details with the director of the institution.

Mom hung up her phone and dropped it into her purse. I saw her eyes narrow slightly as she recognized that Dad was on the verge of one of his moods and, given the context, the likely cause of it.

She gave me a wink, hitched her purse higher on her shoulder, then turned to Dad with a twinkle in her eye and said, "Shall we go?"

* * *

Mom sat in the front pew during the wedding rehearsal, and I could see from the brightness in her gray-blue eyes and the way she was pursing her lips, almost as if she were trying to hold back tears, that she was very moved by the whole thing. It was strange, because for the most part, my mom is not an outwardly emotional kind of person, but something about the occasion seemed to peel away that extra layer of reserved rationality, leaving her a bit more exposed and a little more raw than I was used to seeing her—even more shimmery-eyed than she'd been when she held her grandsons for the first time after Parker's twins were born.

Celia's sorority sister, Maggie, was acting as a sort of master of ceremonies, helping make sure everyone was where they were supposed to be. As the Maid of Honor, I was standing up at the front, and while I should have been completely focused on what was happening in the aisle, I had found myself watching my mom. It was only when I heard a sudden lull in the orders Maggie was barking out from the back of the sanctuary that I was shaken from the reverie of my own thoughts.

I saw Mom turn to look over her shoulder, and though I stood several feet away from the pew where she was seated, I swore I could hear her draw a sharp breath as my gaze followed hers and my eyes fell upon my dad, walking arm-in-arm down the aisle with Celia, the fingers of his big right hand gently curled around her forearm as he looked at her, his brown eyes warm and moist as a wide, toothy smile raised his cheeks and made every single one of us in that sanctuary smile as the two of them reached the front. Celia took her place to my left and he gave her slender arm a little squeeze as she turned around to face the mostly-empty pews.

Suddenly I heard my mom make a sound—less of a sob and more of a swallowed gasp—and that's when I noticed the tears brimming in Dad's eyes. He looked up and his gaze met mine, and his hands being occupied in that moment, his blink loosened a single tear that came to rest on the edge of his cheekbone.

Maggie came jogging down the aisle and said something to us all, but for a minute, neither my parents nor Celia nor I heard whatever it was she was chattering on about. For that solitary moment, it was just the four of us, suspended in the gravity of it all, and I wondered if each of them felt as I did, my breath hitching in my throat as I felt a presence in the air. It wasn't just the spiritual presence you'd expect standing in the front of the Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic Church, though as my father's daughter and a good Catholic girl (usually, anyways), I did feel a certain something in that respect.

No, it was something else—something more than just the feeling of the place—and when I saw my parents' eyes meet and heard them share a sigh as Dad pressed his lips together in a firm line, I knew then that they felt it, too.

* * *

About an hour later, everyone was finally gathered and seated in the downstairs cellar at Salt, a stylish (or, as Dad called it, "swanky") bistro at 11th and Pearl, four blocks away from the Boulderado where we were all staying and where Celia and Caleb's reception was going to be the next day.

The cellar came with its own private bar and we had our own bartender and waitress assigned to tend to our party. All of us—my parents, Parker, his wife and sons, Celia's college friend Maggie, her mom Darleen, her brother Michael, his wife and their baby, Angela, Hodgins, Michael Vincent and his girlfriend, Caleb's parents, brother, sister-in-law and his two best friends, and of course, Celia and Caleb—were seated around the long rectangular table of rustic-looking Colorado blue pine, chatting and telling stories about seemingly everything under the sun.

Dad, Hodgins, Maggie and Caleb were already polishing off their beers while the rest of us had decided to hold off on the hard stuff for a bit and were waiting instead for our soft drinks. Nobody seemed to pay much attention when my mom stood up abruptly as the bartender came down the stairs with two bottles of wine cradled in one arm and a third bottle in the other.

A few minutes later, the waitress came around with large-bowled Bordeaux-style glasses as the bartender followed close on her heels, pouring a glass of red first for my mother, who breathed in a noseful of the wine's aroma before taking a tiny sip. Mom nodded approvingly and smiled as her glass was filled. The barman moved on to pour a glass for me, then Dad, and so on around the table until every adult's glass was full (except for Michael's wife Jenna, who was breastfeeding their daughter Patricia).

As soon as everyone had their drinks, soft or otherwise, Caleb and Celia stood up from their seats at the head of the table. Caleb wrapped his arm loosely around Celia's waist and held up his beer glass to get everyone's attention. After a moment of murmurs and hushing, the room fell silent and twenty-some pairs of eyes swiveled to the back of the room where my friend stood with an genuine if not somewhat awkward smile in the seconds before she began to speak.

"Hey, uhh," she began, nibbling her lip a little as she surveyed the room. Caleb gave her hip a light, encouraging squeeze and she smiled, shrugged a little and continued.

"We want to thank you all for being here tonight...to celebrate with us, and for all of you who came from out of town…" She turned to the middle part of the table where my parents, Darleen, Michael, Parker and I sat and acknowledged us with a nod and a smile.

"We really appreciate you all coming out here to the Wild West to celebrate with us," Caleb, the Colorado native, said with a bright-eyed grin. "The restaurant assured me that your horses will be fed, watered and reshoed by the time you present your valet checks this evening."

Everyone laughed and I saw my dad lean over and whisper in my mom's ear, then wince when she elbowed him in the ribs. He whispered something else to her but fell silent when she patted his leg underneath the table. I watched the two of them for a minute as Celia and Caleb went around the table and one by one acknowledged people by name, blinking myself out of my daze in time to raise my glass of wine for a toast to the parents of the bride and groom. The whole room was a sea of smiles and clinking glasses as everyone drank in the joy of the occasion as they sipped their wine. My mother and Darleen exchanged a look, each of their faces alight with smiles as they watched Celia and her fiancé stand there together at the head of a table full of the people who loved them the most.

After a minute, the table simmered down and attention was once more focused on Celia and Caleb, who turned to each other and smiled as Celia closed her eyes, took a breath and began to speak again.

"There's someone in particular I'd like to recognize," she said, punctuating her statement with another long, steadying breath and rolling her lips together as she turned to my parents.

I saw her nibble the inside of her lip as Caleb leaned in and kissed her temple, whispering something into her hair to which she nodded in reply.

Celia took yet another deep breath, then reached over and placed her left hand over Caleb's, which rested on her hip, lacing her fingers through his as she brought her gaze up again. Our eyes met for a moment and I smiled, then gave her an encouraging nod of my own.

"I never knew my dad," she began, her voice strong but wavering ever so slightly on the edges as she spoke. "He was killed in action in Afghanistan, twenty-three years ago last month, ten days after I was born." She swallowed thickly and I saw her eyes glisten with emotion as she meet her mother's gaze. "He never..." Caleb squeezed her hand gently and whispered something inaudible to her as she turned to my father.

"But even though I never met my dad," she continued, her voice thick but clear and strong, "I was never without a father. Though my own dad never made it back from Afghanistan, his friend Booth did, and through Booth, I came to know my father, and to know a father's love."

My breath caught in my throat as I turned to Dad and saw his mouth fall open, his strong, pockmarked jaw shifting a little from one side to the other as his dark brown eyes glimmered at hearing her words.

"Booth," Celia said, looking straight at Dad. "I'd say that you were the father I never had, except…" She tilted her head with a muted smile, swallowing again the lump I imagined was in her throat. "Except, thanks to you, I had a father. I had someone to teach me how to drive a stick shift and help me practice so I wouldn't flunk my driver's test." She chuckled at the memory, her laugh a liquid chortle that found its echo in the murmur I heard sound in my father's throat next to me. "Someone I knew I could always go to when I needed to hear a reassuring voice when I felt a little lost in the world. Someone who was always there for me, and for my mother and brother. Someone who had been where my dad was, who knew him and the kind of man he was, and through whom I could get a sense of the man my dad was."

I've seen my father get misty-eyed a couple of times—when he held Parker's twin boys, his grandsons, for the very first time, and when I graduated from high school—but it was that night, in the cellar of a swanky bistro in Boulder, Colorado, that I saw my father _cry_ for the very first time.

I watched my mother's slender arm curl around his shoulder as he lowered his gaze and took a deep, slightly ragged breath, nodding to himself before he looked up again and met Celia's eyes. His lips parted and for a minute, it looked like he was going to say something, but instead, he pressed his lips into a line and smiled at her. He sniffled as he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and brushed away the tears with the edge of his thumb.

"Thanks, Booth," Celia said, her pale blue eyes shimmering with emotion as she squeezed Caleb's hand. "For everything." She paused for a beat, then turned to my mother, who until that moment had been focused on my father and seemed almost a little startled when Celia's attention shifted to her. "And thank you, Temperance, for so generously opening your heart and your home to us, letting our family share in your celebrations and sharing in ours. I can't even begin to say how much it meant to my mother, my brother and I over the years. I just..."

Celia swallowed and took a breath but didn't finish her sentence. Caleb hugged her to his chest and kissed the side of her head, then turned to my mom, smiled and gave her a slow nod.

My parents aren't shy people, and our house was always full of the sound of conversation and chatter as I was growing up. But I know that my parents—for all their bickering and endless discussions of science and reason, on the own hand, and of love, the limits of rationality and the inescapable ineffability of it all—are each people of gravitas who recognize that sometimes, we find ourselves in a space beyond words.

And that was where we found ourselves in that that moment as we reflected on all that had happened to the bride and her groom, and how wonderful it would have been if her father had been able to be there to see it all and celebrate with her.

I was thinking about Uncle Louie when Dad turned to Mom with his brows raised and deep creases in his forehead as he gave her an odd, almost uncertain look. They held each other's gaze for a minute as they had one of those silent conversations the two of them seem uniquely capable of having, then Mom smiled and patted Dad on the thigh.

She stood up and motioned for the bartender to approach. The goateed young man nodded curtly and came over with one of the unopened bottles of wine. Mom accepted the bottle and turned it in her hand as if inspecting it one last time, then glanced over her shoulder as my father stood up. He rested his right hand on the small of her back and leaned in to whisper something in her ear that made her smile.

Turning to the bride and groom, Mom said, "Celia, as you know, Booth and I went about the process of marriage and family in a somewhat unorthodox manner."

I heard someone behind me laugh, then looked over my shoulder to see Angela covering her mouth as Hodgins gave her a disapproving slap on the hand.

Mom, of course, didn't skip a beat. "Booth already had a child, of course," she said. "His wonderful son, Parker, who I met in the middle of the first year of our partnership." She looked over at my brother, who sat between his six year-old sons, Kellen and Jason, and beamed back at her with a son's love shimmering in his eyes.

"We were married in January of 2011," she explained. "But because Booth had just gone back to work after recovering from nerve surgery, and because the weather conditions in January aren't particularly conducive to tourism in the northern hemisphere, we postponed our honeymoon. I became pregnant with Lucia that spring, which further delayed our honeymoon."

When Mom mentioned my name, Dad reached over, put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a gentle, playful squeeze.

"It wasn't until May two years later, in 2013, that Booth and I finally took our long-deferred honeymoon." I saw Dad's brows furrow and he nudged my mom to keep the story moving, which she did, but only after slapping his arm with a _pffft _sound. "We ended up going to Veneto, in northern Italy, to the province of Verona. While we were there, we discovered a wonderful wine, Bella Lucha, an _Amarone della Valpolicella, _which we enjoyed so much, we bought two cases of it. Those two cases were bottled in 2011."

Mom held up the bottle, turning it in her hand as she passed it to Caleb, label facing upwards.

"The wine we have been drinking tonight is from that case of _Amarone della Valpolicella," _she said. "Made from grapes that were picked in the first two weeks of October, 2010. Booth and I bought this wine—which was, in a sense, 'born' when you were, made from grapes grown in the hills of the province of Verona, where your father Lou's family was from—and we've been holding onto it for twenty years, waiting to share it with you on the occasion of your wedding."

Celia's mouth fell open with a laugh, and her cheeks blushed as her eyes glimmered with gratitude. She touched her lips with her fingers as she smiled and considered what to say, but before she could speak, my father did.

"I remember sitting in a guard tower with your dad," he told her, his voice cracking a little as he looked at her with emotion welling in his eyes. "Over there, you know. Your dad would show me the ultrasound pictures your mom would send, and he'd carry them around in his pocket, right here." Dad patted his thigh demonstratively, then laughed. "We usually kept our letters and stuff like that in our thigh pockets so we could get to 'em without having to take off our body armor. Anyway, your dad was so in love with you, and so excited about you, he couldn't wait to show me the latest ultrasound pictures he got at mail call."

Dad winced a little, then took a deep breath and rolled his lips together in a firm line as he hugged my mom closer to his side—for strength, I guess.

"He loved you very much," Dad said. "It broke his heart when a high-priority operation got pushed out a week, but the brass said we had to delay Lou's R&R, even though he had a newborn baby girl waiting at home to meet him. He was nearly crawling out of his skin to get out of there, and to finally get home to see you. He had a picture of you in your mama's arms, with your brother, that your mom had emailed to him and he'd gotten printed out by a friend of his at the Marine base down the road. He took a copy of it—that picture—and he folded up and put it in his chest pocket, under his armored vest."

Dad patted his chest, right over his heart, then cleared his throat.

"He had that picture of you guys right next to his heart when he went off on that last mission," Dad said, the last few words coming out almost as a croak. "He loved you, Celia, and he thought about you all the time we were over there. Though he never held you in his arms, he loved you more than you will ever know."

As I listened, I thought of Uncle Louie, with his dark, laughing eyes and a bushy black Green Beret beard like I'd seen him in photographs Dad brought home from Afghanistan. I could see him standing there in a pair of dusty fatigue trousers and a sweaty old Giants T-shirt with his burly, hairy arms crossed in front of his chest and a toothy, nicotine-stained grin on his face, looking down at us from Heaven with tears in his eyes as he watched his little girl on the eve of her wedding.

"He'd be proud of you, Cel," Dad said, smiling broadly through his tears. His shimmery brown eyes narrowed a little, then he laughed and said, "And Caleb—he'd tell you to take care of his little girl, and to be good to her, or else he'd have to get commando on your ass."

Everyone around the table laughed, in no small part because they knew that Dad and Lou were men of a certain kind—woven of the same yarn, and cut from the same cloth—and that Lou would have been every bit as protective as Dad.

"Seriously, though," he said with a little sniff. "He'd be proud of you, and happy for you both, that you've found happiness in each other. It's all a father really wants for his little girl—for her to find happiness—and he'd be thrilled to see you today, and to know that you had. We're all happy for you, Cel...your mom, Michael, Bones and me...all of us. And I know in my heart, Cel, that your dad's happy for you, too."

As I watched Dad talk about his friend, I felt certain that Lou would have agreed that, if he couldn't be around to help Darleen raise their son and daughter into adulthood, having Booth there to be their guiding hand was the next best thing.

Mom turned to Dad, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, briefly nuzzled his shoulder, then turned back to Celia with a smile.

"Tonight," she said, "we share this Bella Lucha _Amarone della Valpolicella _in celebration of you and Caleb, and the love you found in each other."

"The second case," my father said, his voice suddenly stronger and clearer than it had been just moments before, though I could still hear the emotion on the edge of his words as a rich, throaty thickness. "The second case is in the basement cellar of our house in Virginia. It'll be waiting for you when the two of you get back from your honeymoon. As soon as you two are back from Kauai and settled in, we'll have it shipped out to you."

That was when Celia smiled and pulled away from Caleb, then walked over and hugged my parents: first my mom, who accepted the hug with a hint of awkwardness in the first moments before relaxing into the embrace, and then my dad, whose broad shoulders, strong arms and big hands seemed to all but swallow up my small-framed friend.

"Thanks," I heard Celia say into Dad's coat. Pulling away, she wiped away a tear and smiled. "I love you guys," she said. "Thanks for everything."

I know it's a cliché, but in this case, it's really true: there wasn't a dry eye in the room as we watched Celia steal one more hug from my dad.

The gravity of the moment lightened as the dinner moved on, and the heaviness in the air was replaced by laughter and the happy chatter of a big, extended family reunited and growing as we celebrated Celia and Caleb, and finished off that case of _Amarone della Valpolicella._

I was glad for the levity, and as I watched my father, I saw his own mood lift. Years and decades have passed since Dad came back from his last war, but the residue of those experiences never completely washed away, especially the loss of his friend Lou. In my father's laughter, I took comfort, glad that the painful reminder of loss didn't overshadow the joy of the occasion. I felt relief when, halfway through the meal, Dad turned to me and smiled, then leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.

Somewhere amid the anguish my father still feels over the death of his closest friend in that crash twenty-three years ago lies something else—a sense of gratitude that he had been able to do this for his friend, his widow and the children he left behind. Every time says her name, _Celia_, he hears the echo of his name, _Seeley, _and Uncle Louie's trust in him rings clear. I believe that my father draws strength from that, knowing that his comrade and friend loved him and trusted him to love and watch over his family in his stead.

I know this because every day I hear _my _name, I'm reminded that, as great a man as my father is, he carries a great burden inside of him. It weighs on him—the sole survivor of the event that took the lives of twenty-one other men who left behind wives and girlfriends, children, mothers and fathers who loved them every bit as much as we all love my dad. That burden, that sense of duty, not only weighed on my dad these last twenty years, but I think it propelled him forward, too. Knowing that he had a job to do, an unspoken promise to keep to his slain friend, and that Uncle Louie believed in him enough to name his daughter after him, helped my father heal and be strong—strong enough for Mom, Parker and me, and for Darleen, Michael and Celia, too.

I heard my mom say once that Dad is the strongest man she knows.

I'm pretty sure that if Uncle Louie were around, he'd agree.

(Then he'd tell my dad to fuck off.)

* * *

**A/N: **_I think this story has one more chapter left to it. (You'd think I'd know, but no.)_

_I've said it before, but this is a dramatic departure from the kind of thing I've done previously, so I'd really like to know what you all think. Did I just send Kleenex stock up a few points? Are you ready to throw your laptop or tablet into a volcano? Let me know your thoughts. Please? Pretty please? _

_Oh! And thanks for reading :-)_


	4. Chapter 4

**More Than One Kind**

* * *

By: dharmamonkey  
Rating: T  
Disclaimer: _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

* * *

**A/N: **_This chapter won't be quite as Kleenexy as the last, but still. By now you know what kind of yarn this is. So, those among you inclined to get misty, well—you might want to have them handy. Thanks for hanging in there with me on this one. Enjoy!_

* * *

**Chapter 4**

* * *

The wedding and the reception were as beautiful as we expected that they would be, and everyone—Mom included—teared up a little when Celia walked down the aisle of that church on my father's arm.

Something happened when the priest turned to Celia and Caleb with a droopy-jowled, twinkly-eyed smile and said, "You have declared your consent before the Church. May the Lord in his goodness strengthen your consent and fill you both with his blessings. What God has joined, men must not divide." It wasn't simply that my friend and her new husband were now, officially, one before God and His sacred Church. It was something else, something I saw in my father's eyes when Celia and Caleb leaned into one another and kissed.

It was as if I could see a weight lifted from my father's shoulders. He sat next to Mom in the front pew, and during the last part of the ceremony, I saw him reach for her hand. Then, just before the priest said his short benediction, Dad turned to her with a soft, closed-mouthed smile. When the bride and groom kissed, I saw him gently squeeze Mom's hand and his shoulders seemed to relax, as he'd been carrying a heavy weight and suddenly had that burden removed.

I saw him look up at the ceiling of the church, purse his lips firmly together, then look down again as his mouth fell open slightly and he nodded, seemingly at no one or nothing in particular.

I can't be sure, but I think in that moment, having seen Lou Bastone's youngest child—the beautiful little baby girl who Lou never got to hold in his arms before he was taken away from this world—married to a wonderful young man with whom she would begin her own family, my father felt he had done his duty. He'd finally fulfilled that one last unspoken promise to his fallen comrade.

So when I saw my father look skyward, then down again as he nodded and breathed a quiet sigh of assent, I think it was his way of telling Uncle Louie, _"She's all set now._" And she was, of course. In that moment, as she kissed Caleb with a happy smile that nothing in the world could have wiped away, a page was turned. Lou Bastone's baby girl was all grown up. No longer the tiny baby Dad cradled in his arms at her father's funeral, Celia was everything a father would have wanted his daughter to be—a strong, smart woman with a good education, a rewarding career, and a wonderful husband who loves her more than life itself. By opening their home, their hearts and their lives to Celia, her mother and brother, Mom and Dad helped Lou's family achieve the dream he had for them, even though he didn't live to see it through.

So, while it may seem a bit odd, that, _that, _was the moment during the ceremony when I began to cry.

* * *

After all the speeches were spoken, toasts were toasted and dances were danced, the wedding celebration wound down and everyone went their respective ways. Celia and Caleb boarded a United flight the next morning bound for a week in Kauai, where she promised me they would leave their hotel room for at least a couple of hours a day to enjoy the quiet, relatively uncrowded beaches at their resort. Parker, his wife and sons headed back to Charlotte, where he was due to testify in court first thing Monday morning on an interstate banking fraud case he'd worked during his rookie year with the Bureau. Darleen returned to Brooklyn along with Michael and his family. Angela and Hodgins, and Michael Vincent and his girlfriend all headed back to Washington.

Mom, Dad and I decided to take advantage of the time and the distance from the demands of home. We caught a puddle-jumper to Alamosa, a small city of 10,000 or so located in the southern part of the state, about two and a half hours north of Santa Fe, and from there drove an hour west to the tiny hamlet of South Fork, where we'd rented a cabin on a west-facing bluff overlooking the Rio Grande River.

I was sitting out back, underneath the deck next to the fire pit watching the last rosy fingers of the sunset fade into twilight when my parents came down from the house. (Dad and I had laughed when we pulled up in front of the property, which had been described in the marketing materials as a "rustic cabin" but was, in fact, a 2,300 square-foot, three-bedroom, three bath chalet. "Some cabin," my father observed before the two of us dissolved into a fit of snickering.) I'd managed to plan my fire-making efforts perfectly, so that by the time the sun set and the warm thin mountain air began shedding heat, the roaring fire was giving off enough heat that one could sit there quite comfortably in a pair of shorts and a light fleece vest and feel perfectly toasty.

"What are you doing?" I heard my dad ask as he and Mom made their way across the yard, crunching their way over gravel, twigs, stones and pine needles.

"So much for sniper stealth," I snorted as I swung my phone's camera around to catch my folks' fire-lit faces in the video, ignoring for the moment my father's query.

Mom laughed. "Your father's always thought himself a lot quieter than he actually is," she said with a crooked grin as she slapped my father on the bottom.

I saw Dad's eyes roll as he moved closer to the firelight. "Yeah, whatever," he huffed. "Miss 'Damn Near Got Us Kicked Out of the Courtroom During Her Father's Murder Trial.' You're definitely not stealth." He took a seat in one of the Adirondack chairs next to me, then glanced over at my phone's screen. "Oh! Hey, Justin."

"Hey, Mr. Booth," squawked the voice on the other end of the line. My boyfriend waved through the phone as my mother took a seat on the other side of me. "Hi, Dr. Brennan."

"How's Aitape?" Mom asked him, angling her head to one side and narrowing her eyes as she watched him on the other side of the video call.

"Well," Justin began with a smile, "I'm actually closer to Pagwi than I am to Aitape, which is where the 41st Infantry made its amphibious landing on April 22, 1944. I'm about an hour west of Wewak and from there ninety minutes inland by four-by-four, though that's probably being generous since the roads here are a bit of a mess. We're lucky we got here before the worst of the rainy season really set in. The nearest village is about two kilometers from the dig site."

Mom smiled, and I suspected from the shimmer in her eye that she was thinking of the last time _she_ spent months on a dig—more than twenty years ago when she worked on a project in Indonesia's Northern Maluku province, the summer before the helicopter crash.

"You think those are our guys?" Dad asked.

Justin nodded. "From the material found near the remains—helmets, brass buckles from rifle slings, rusted steel components from M1 Garands, .30-06 shell casings, bayonet lugs and so forth, and what little remains of their boots and uniforms—no question that these are American soldiers. Six men, with approximate height and body morphologies consistent with the MIAs from that squad from the 41st Infantry."

"Ninety years later," my father said, "it's still good we can bring them home. Let their grandchildren or great-grandchildren know what happened to their granddads and see to it that they get a proper burial. Good for you, kid."

"Thanks," Justin said with a grin. "Dr. Brennan, although our primary mission here is the recovery and preliminary identification of these soldiers' remains, you'll be happy to know that we've catalogued some interesting findings with regard to some of the tropical diseases these men acquired in theater. Early indications of hyperostosis and synosis in the lower extremities suggests to me that one of these individuals suffered elephantiasis that—"

Justin suddenly stopped and stared at the screen with a frown as his phone beeped to signal an incoming call.

"Crap. Sorry, but I've gotta take this. It's the JPAC lab in Honolulu. I've been waiting for dental records to come through on one of these guys for two days, so—"

"Do what you gotta do," my dad said. "And stay safe over there, alright?"

Justin grinned, then his eyes flicked over to meet mine across the thousands of miles separating us. He scrunched his nose and shrugged in a silent apology for cutting our call so short.

"I love you," I told him, my cheeks blushing a little as I felt my parents' eyes watching us. "Talk tomorrow?"

"I love you, too," he said with a smile, reaching his forefingers up to touch the screen. "I'll try call tomorrow around this time when we break for lunch, okay?"

"Okay," I said. "Keep your boots dry, babe."

"Okay." He laughed and winked. "I will."

"Goodbye, Mr. Forsythe," Mom said just as the call disconnected.

Four years my elder, Justin was a Ph.D. candidate in Physical Anthropology and had been one of my mom's grad students interns when we met. I didn't know when I met him that he was not only a forensic anthropologist in training, but also an Army Reservist, which of course immediately endeared him to my father.

We had mixed feelings about his current project when it came up. On the one hand, from a professional standpoint, it was a tremendous opportunity to put the skills he'd been honing at the lab to work in the field, in the service of a cause—the recovery and identification of servicemen missing in action—that was not only meaningful to him as a soldier but obviously to me and my family. On the other hand, the fact that he had to go right away meant that he would miss an important family event, but when we told my parents about the find in New Guinea, my parents encouraged him to go.

I looked at my phone's blank, blackened screen for a minute, then slid it into the thigh pocket of my cargo shorts and buttoned it shut. I propped my legs up on the stone wall of the fire pit and crossed them, then leaned back in my chair as Dad handed me a cold bottle of Fat Tire beer.

"Thanks," I said, accepting the bottle gratefully. "You guys should get a place like this—in the mountains, you know. Maybe in North Carolina, or southwestern Virginia. Northern Georgia, perhaps?"

"What are you talkin' about, huh?" Dad said with a smirk, bumping my arm with his elbow. "You trying to plan out my retirement for me?"

I blinked, surprised by what I doubted was a Freudian slip. "You finally going to retire, Dad?"

Mom swung her head around and smiled. "It's only taken five years and endless discussion, but—"

Dad narrowed his eyes and took a long sip of his beer, glaring at my mother over the top of the bottle as he tipped it back.

"_Everything_ with you requires endless discussion, Bones," he told her, the gleam in his eye belying his irritation. "That's why my hair's turned gray. You talked the color right out of it."

Mom just rolled her eyes.

"Yeah," he admitted, turning back to me. "I'm not cut out for all the politics bullshit or administrative claptrap that comes with being an Assistant Director. Plus…" He nudged my calf with the heel of his running shoe. "It's high time to get your mother out of the lab."

"My hours at the lab have been sharply reduced in the last five years," she protested. "I offered to go _emeritus_ when you left the field office, Booth." She swirled her Pinot Grigio around in her glass, then cocked her brow and added, "It's not as if we need the money. We invested the proceeds of my book sales very wisely over the last twenty years."

"Umm, okay," I said with a laugh. "So you're really gonna do it, Dad? I mean, retire?"

"Damn right I am," he said, grinning proudly as he raised his bottle and tilted it towards mine. "Your mom and I have busted our asses long enough. It's time for me and your mom to spend more time on things for us. Travel the world a bit. Besides, with your brother down in Charlotte, it'd be nice to see the grandkids more than three times a year."

I smiled and nodded, then drew my legs up closer to my body as I leaned closer to the fire.

Mom raised her glass in the air. "To retirement," she said. Dad and I joined her, lifting our bottles up and clinking them together, then gently clinking Mom's wine glass.

"To freedom!" Dad said with a chuckle, suppressing a grin as he took a sip. "Cheers." As he brought his bottle to rest on his thigh, lip curled up and he shot me a strange look. "What's wrong?" he asked me. "I thought you liked Fat Tire." He looked down at his half-empty bottle, then frowned. "I bought it 'cause it's the kind you like, Lucy."

"I do," I said, turning the bottle in my hand. The Fort Collins-brewed ale had been a favorite of mine since making my first trip out to Colorado after Celia took the job with the prosthetics company. "But I've been trying to cut back..."

Mom's eyes narrowed first as she studied me, her pale gray eyes reflecting back the fire's amber flames as the twilight around us darkened. I saw the glint of recognition in those eyes as she realized I'd had only a single tiny sip of wine during the rehearsal dinner (just one to taste the _Amarone_), and none whatsoever at the reception. Seeing the shift in my mother's expression, my dad's brows knit low over his eyes as he gave me a puzzled look.

"I'm pregnant," I said, unable to bite back a smile as I watched both of my parents' eyes light up and smiles widen their faces. "I'm ten weeks along."

For a second, they grinned like fools but neither of them said anything.

"Why are you being so quiet?" I asked them, happy but marginally unnerved by their sudden silence. "Dad?"

My father set his beer on the ground behind the leg of his chair, then leaned over and put his hand on my shoulder. "If it's anybody's but Justin's," he said with a broad, toothy, grin, "I'm gonna kill him. The father, that is. Unless it's Justin." Dad winked. "If it's Justin, I'm taking him out for beer and wings as soon as he gets back from Wimbly-wombly, New Guinea."

I rolled my eyes. "It's _Wewak_, Dad," I sighed in feigned annoyance. "And yes, Justin's the father." Mom was beaming, clearly thrilled about the news—more happy, in fact, than I'd actually expected her to be. "This wasn't how we planned to do things," I told them. "It really wasn't. We were hoping to talk to you guys after Celia's wedding about us, you know, but, well, the Army caught wind of the find site and asked Justin to join a team they were sending to New Guinea, and then two weeks later, I was late, and…"

"It was the antibiotics," Mom said, her gaze focused on the fire as she worked through the problem in her mind. "The National Zoo had an outbreak of_ Mycobacterium tuberculosis_ and bacterial meningitis among some of the primate populations earlier this year, didn't you? You were put on a prophylactic course of antibiotics since you work in close contact with the animals."

"Yeah," I confirmed with a nod. "Rifampicin's been around for sixty, seventy years? You'd think with a degree in Biology from Cornell I'd freakin' remember how Rifampicin works and to use enough common sense to…" I couldn't help but laugh. "It's okay, though," I said. "We were planning on getting married _then_ getting pregnant, but hey. That's life, right? We'll just need to accelerate the timeline a bit."

That's when my father's dark brown eyes (which had glazed over when mom and I started talking about mycobacteria, meningitis and antibiotics) suddenly widened and he laughed out loud, almost despite himself, knocking his beer over in the process. He waved off the ruined beer as the sudsy brew soaked into the loose dirt at our feet.

"Wait, you mean—?" Dad couldn't even formulate the question, he was so happy and flustered.

"Damn dental records," I sighed. "We really wanted to tell you together, Justin and I, tonight, but..."

No force in nature could have wiped the smiles off my parents' faces, and a part of me felt bad that Justin couldn't be there with me to see their reactions.

"He says he'll be back stateside in a couple of weeks," I told them. "We want to get married, and we don't want to wait too much longer to do it. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, but—"

Mom leaned closer to me, bathing her face in the orange glow of the fire as she placed her hand on my thigh. "There's no hurry," she said, cutting me off the way I'd seen her do a thousand times with Dad. She thinks faster than the rest of us, and while she's gotten better about it over the years, she's still apt to interrupt when she gets excited. "Really, Lucia, it's—"

"If we don't do it in the next couple of months, well…" I handed my beer, which was thankfully still cold, to my father. "I'll be huge, and if we wait until after…"

Dad tipped my beer back and took a long swig, then grinned back at me.

"You won't be huge, Lucy," he told me. "You're gonna be beautiful. Gorgeous. Just like your mother was when she was pregnant."

Mom's eyelashes fluttered at hearing my father's compliment.

"Hmmm," I murmured, unconvinced by my father's romanticized admiration of the pregnant female form. "Maybe. Seeing as how big I was, Dad, when I was born, and how big Parker was, and how big Parker's boys were, even though they were a month early…" I hesitated for a moment, then leaned back in my chair again so I could see both of my parents' eyes. "With twins, once I start showing, I'm gonna get pretty big pretty quick. And two babies will be twice the handful that one would be, so if we don't do this now…"

"Twins?" my mother asked, her apple-shaped cheeks full and high as her entire face smiled at the news. I nodded. "The tendency to hyperovulate does run in families, and so while it's certainly unexpected, it's…"

Mom went on about the heritability of twinning and reproducing in multiples, but neither Dad nor I were really paying much attention at that moment. He was too stunned to do anything more than grin, and I was quite sure I'd never seen him happier than he looked right then.

He turned and stared into the fire for a few seconds, then raised his chin and looked up at the crescent moon that had just climbed over the San Juan Mountains in the distance. He closed one eye and studied the moon with a sniper's focus for a moment, then grunted a quiet laugh and nodded as he wagged his finger at the rising moon.

"You didn't have to do this, hmm?" he whispered at the sky. "But we'll take it." Dad gave a little shrug and turned his gaze back to the fire, which crackled and popped as he murmured in quiet communion with his long-dead friend. Mom just shook her head at his sentimentality and what she calls superstition, then reached for my hand and smiled.

"You crazy little bastard," Dad said to the flames with a sloppy, happy grin as Mom squeezed my fingers in her hand.

"We'll take it."

* * *

**The End**

* * *

**A/N: **_That's how it ends, and so the tale of the intermingling of the Booth and the Bastone clans winds to a conclusion. I hope you enjoyed this piece, sentimental though it was—sorry!_

_I can't bribe you with another chapter, but I hope you find it in you to let me know what you thought of this piece. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Please consider leaving a review._

_Happy new year to all, and thanks for reading!_


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